Introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background.
My name is Christophe Sabatier and I am leading the digital IP activities at X-FAB with RAM, ROM and digital standard cells libraries development including the development and measurement of test chips. I have about 15 years of experience in digital design with a background as front-end digital designer on products dedicated to the consumer and security market.
What is your title and/or role in the project?
I am the project leader from X-FAB in the REALHOLO project. X-FAB, as an analog/mixed-signal CMOS foundry, is bringing its expertise in CMOS design and manufacturing to the consortium and the CMOS backplane will be manufactured in our fab in France using the 0.18 µm CMOS technology. In addition, within the scope of the REALHOLO project, X-FAB is the lead of Task 2.3 “Design for automotive standard requirements”.
What are your contributions to the project? (Specify what tasks you are responsible for)
The goal of our task is to put in place several methodologies related to design for test and design for reliability to guarantee good yield and reliable tested dies with zero-dppm (Zero Defective Part Per Million) to be compliant with automotive standards.
- A particular attention should be paid to the provided digital IPs which should be designed with a good compromise to include maximum Design for Manufacturing techniques without loss of performance in terms of power/timing/area;
- And the test specifications should be performed in order to detect the maximum potential manufacturing defects with the minimum test time. The target is to detect all potentially critical defects with the most optimized test time and to prove success of the developed methods on test chips;
During the project, a comparison of the results of the newly developed test methods with the original test specifications will be performed to generate valuable indicators (test coverage) for the quality of the methods and for potential further improvements.
What challenges can you foresee in the project?
There are lots of challenges within this project in almost every aspect including the zero Defective Part Per Million concept in the digital part which becomes a standard mainly in automotive market.
How do you think the project outcome could affect our daily life?
We will see entirely new applications emerge. REALHOLO will develop the fundamental infrastructure for making this possible.
